Monday, July 8, 2013

Geisterhands heroine: Sheyla

Today I wanted to tell you guys (and girls) something about Sheyla,
the main heroine of "Geisterhand".

Geisterhand is german and means "ghost hand" in english.
And yup, it's the name of our second game.


Unlike Paperheads which was a spin-off, Geisterhand is the real thing.
Uhm... maybe I should explain this a bit more in detail.
While Paperheads featured some of the characters you might see in future games of us,
they were almost all out-of-character in Paperheads.

For example:
Verdani wouldn't dress herself like she did in Paperheads.
(originally she doesn't even like makeup)
Also Neamera would never even want to be the boss of such an organization.
While Chao wouldn't work together with Neamera,
and Ledun is "originally" some guy that transforms into a werewolf.
Furthermore the world of Paperheads has nothing to do with the "original story",
or the world the original story takes place in.
(in Paperheads all the characters had been depicted as "normal" humans,
but in the original story all of them are not regular human beings)

That in mind, lets get to the core.






Geisterhand




Geisterhand plays in a world similar to ours,
were demons and monsters appear occasionally.
The story takes place in a modern world,
similar to our world as it is right now.



















The main character 'Sheyla', isn't an everyday human being.
Aside from firing regular bullets,
she's also able to focus soul-power into her bullets.
This way she's able to fire strong shots with special properties.
(yes, you can view this as "magic", though I refer to it as "soul-power" (SP),
basically I guess it's the same as MP, Mana, whatever you want to call it)
After defeating the bosses she absorbs their powers,
in order to be able to use a new type of charged shot.

Sheyla is really swift and agile,
in fact she's one of the fastest beings on earth.
She accomplishes this by using soul-power to boost her movement (and the speed of her bullets), though she can only keep this up for short periodes of time.
If she uses this ability, her senses are also sharpened to keep up with her movement speed.
The bullet time/time alter mode shows this by reducing the speed of everything except Sheyla and her bullets by 50%.
This means that she's able to move twice as fast as normally possible.
(as well as shooting twice as often,
in the same period of time that the enemies experience)


What's not directly shown in the game:
Sheyla is a trained and experienced assassin,
and she's mainly working as an agent for the government.
Taking on risky jobs is pretty normal for her,
as well as killing all sorts of opponents, including demons and monsters.
Though being send onto a monster infested island is a completely new experience for her.

Sheyla is a pretty sweet girl, naturally friendly and cheerful.
(though beware, some of this is only faked, since well... she's an assassin,
and being "underestimated" is always good)

She's really brave, though she's not that self-confident.
Wait what? Brave but not that self-confident?
How does that work out?

Well, view it like this:
She tends to be brave, but she knows her limits.
Especially because she's an assassin, she likes to pick her enemies off guard,
or surprise them with her swift movement.
If she somehow fails, she's tending to escape quickly.
She likes to pick fights with strong enemies,
but she's not dumb enough to keep on fighting when she's at a clear disadvantage.
Hence she's kinda brave, but not too confident in her skills in a head-on engagement.
Well, since she's a woman she has a disadvantage in strength against most enemies anyway.
At any rate, she knows what she's doing,
and she's being successful the way she's doing things.

If you've got any questions about her, feel free to ask.

On a side note:
Sheyla is the very first character I ever created myself, this happened more than 8 years ago.
I've also used to draw her myself, but currently Crescentia is drawing her.


Saturday, July 6, 2013

Small status report

The last 2 weeks we made no real progress,
since Crescentias notebook broke down and it had to be repaired.
Well, everything is fixed now.
Since we do backups of everything on a regular basis, nothing bad happened.
It's just that no graphics had been made during this period.

We also decided to not do any hentai animations for the bosses,
because the character sprites are way too small.
You can't even see anything specific on them...
so creating those sprites is just wasted energy I guess?
(well, maybe for some people it's still good despite being such small sprites, but it's hard to satisfy everyone without making compromises, and we rather invest our working time into something else)


Since we're short at least 2 weeks, we decided to cut down from 15 to 13 CG scenes.
(well, we want to get it done as soon as possible, while being as good as possible, and I doubt that those 2 scenes would make a big difference in game quality, but it allows us to finish the game in less time)

Well I'm a bit clueless about the CG scenes narrative as well.
So it's better if I only have to come up with scenes for 13 instead of 15 CG scenes.

I guess I should try to explain this a bit more detailed:
I don't know if my CG scene texts are good enough, and I find it especially difficult to write non-repetitive text, since well... it mostly happens the same.
The biggest difference is that on each CG a different enemy has sex with the heroine.
And while on some CG scenes she enjoys it, on others she doesn't.
It's not that it's the same text all the time, but you could say that there is a similar feel to it.
At least that's what one of the testplayers told me, and I think she's got a point.

Well... it's always:
Heroine loses --> gets captured --> gets fucked etc.
Since the monsters mostly can't talk, there isn't that much room for dialoge.
(it's mostly just Sheyla saying something or thinking)

The biggest thing I learned out of this is, that in future games,
I'll do the CG scenes more as part of the story, so I can avoid this repetitive feeling.
E.g. if the heroine has to rescue some girls from slave traders,
and she fails, she gets sold as a slave herself etc.
That way the CG scenes narrative, as well as dialoge during CG scenes, isn't repeating itself.
Because it's not just being fucked, it's also happening something else, at least in theory.

But of course this means, that doing one CG scene per enemy isn't quite working out.
(it's more of a "one CG scene per stage" then, well... this cancels out the need to lose all the time, so the player just has to lose once to get the CG and then he/she can concentrate on winning the stage)

It's just an idea right now, and I'll have to think more about it.
At any rate, this only matters for future games.
(the current game is fully planned out and it's on it's way to completion)



Good news is, that we found someone who is supporting us by doing music for the game.
I can't share that many details yet, but I'll give out some information as soon as possible.
So I guess it's not that long until the demo will be released.
(and yes, we suck at doing music ourselves... we completely wasted our time, but well... you never know unless you try)

Originally I wanted to write about the improvements I made to the game while Crescentia's notebook was being repaired.
But this post is already too long.

Well, I'll do that some other time.
Tomorrow, or maybe in the next couple days I'll write an article about the heroine.
And yup, I'll also post a nice artwork of her which is NOT in the game.
(well... it actually is... but in the game it doesn't have all the colors it originally had, so the version of the artwork I'll post here is better than the one in the game, because it has full color instead of being yellowish)